-Livemint.com The GST Council has fixed a 12% GST rate on fertilizers, up from the current 4-8% rates, depending on raw materials used and in which states the products are sold New Delhi: India’s landmark tax reform, the goods and services tax (GST), may not be good news for farmers. Retail prices of commonly used fertilizers and micronutrients are likely to increase, not only raising the cost of cultivation but also leading...
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India uses up more groundwater than US and China -Subodh Varma
-The Times of India Right on the edge of the Ganga basin that spans 11 Indian states lies Naujhil block, a few kilometres west of the Yamuna in UP's Mathura district. You would think this is a blessed location with plentiful water all round. With its 17 tributaries, including the Yamuna, Ganga's catchment area has about 525 billion cubic metres (bcm) of surface water and about 171 bcm of groundwater. On average,...
More »Criminalising Forest-Dwellers Has Not Helped India's Forests or Wildlife. It's Time for a New Deal -Meenal Tatpati and Sneha Gutgutia
-TheWire.in Instead of evicting forest-dwelling communities for engaging in traditional activities in protected areas and reserved forests, the government should use them for co-management. In a circular released on March 28, 2017, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) ordered the directors of all tiger reserves to refrain from recognising the rights of forest dwellers within critical tiger habitats. Since its enactment in 2006, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of...
More »In NTD fight, the end in sight -Soumya Swaminathan
-The Hindu Around the world, nearly 1.6 billion people are affected by a group of diseases so ignored that the term used to refer to them is called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). These are a cluster of 17 diseases affecting the poorest people living in the least developed pockets of the world. While some of these diseases may be unfamiliar, leprosy, kala-azar and filariasis are better known in India and being targeted...
More »India ranks below Lanka, Bangladesh on healthcare index -Rupali Mukherjee & Sushmi Dey
-The Times of India NEW DELHI/ MUMBAI: India continues to be one of the poor performers ranking at 154, much below China, Sri Lanka and even Bangladesh, in terms of quality and accessibility of healthcare, according to the new Global Burden of Disease study published in the Lancet. The study points that despite the country's socio-economic development, India has failed to achieve in healthcare goals and the gap between the score and...
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